Our Longest Day

All I wanted on Wednesday was to finish work as soon as possible and catch up on some sleep I’d missed the previous evening. But this turned out to be wishful thinking. Violence erupted across Kosovo - and members of my family were caught up in it.

“Our house has been burned down,” read a chilling text message I received late at night from my 13-year-old cousin, a member of the last Serb family living in the village of Kishnica, near Gracanica. “Please help us if there is any way you can!”

Wednesday, March 17, was the longest day in the four years that I have lived in Kosovo, and the darkest since the end of the war in 1999.

When the first demonstration started at around 11 am local time, my first thought was, “Oh, it’s Mitrovica again” - just another incident between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in that divided town.

But then I received a panicked phone call from a local journalist in the Serbian enclave of Caglavica, some 50 kilometres south of Mitrovica, screaming that the community was being shot at by crowds of Albanians.

Almost immediately, phone calls started coming in from Serbs from all over Kosovo. The trouble had spread far beyond Mitrovica and Caglavica to almost every place where Serbs still live - Silovo, Gracanica, Prizren, Belo Polje, Lipljan and Gnjilane.

I decided to go to Caglavica in a United Nations car with some other journalists. But as we walked into the UN compound in the capital Pristina, we were rushed by security guards screaming, “Go inside, get away from the gate!”

And then I saw the crowd marching on the UN headquarters.

What struck me was the youth of the crowd - they were around my age, 26 years old, or even younger. Many of them were thuggish in appearance, and were reminiscent of the football fans who often cause trouble in Serbia.

We were left with no choice but to stay within the UN compound and use our mobile phones to stay in touch with the outside world.

Serbs from all over Kosovo continued to phone, shouting and begging for help until long after 3 am.

And friends from Serbia and all over the world kept ringing to find out what was happening.

While the riots spread across the protectorate, and the news of deaths and injuries was reported in the media, my family in Vojvodina in the north of Serbia was worried sick. My mother almost had a nervous breakdown, asking me to find a way out of Kosovo and leave it forever. Even as I write this, I am trying to calm her down.

In the midst of the smoke and chaos I tried to call Ramush Haradinaj, an ex- Kosovo Liberation Army commander who is now leader of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK, to ask him whether he planned to ask people to halt the violence. But his phone was switched off.

However, I found the answers to my questions in today’s press statements issued by the AAK and the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK - two of the largest parties in Kosovo’s parliament.

“Serbs are misusing the good will of Albanians to create an equal society for all. They don’t want to integrate into Kosova society. Even five years after the war, their will remains the same - the will for violence against Albanians. This can no longer be tolerated,” read the PDK statement.

Meanwhile, the AAK claimed that parallel structures operating in northern, Serb-run Kosovo, were to blame for the violence.

These responses have deepened my own conviction that Kosovo has regressed to the chaos of June 1999, and that this time its prospects for recovery are far slimmer.

And yet several of my Albanian friends, disgusted by the day’s events, telephoned me yesterday to offer me a place to stay and whatever other help they could give me. Their kindness is proof that demonisation of a whole nation - Serb or Albanian - is not the way forward, and it must not be allowed to prevail.

Tanja Matic is IWPR’s programme coordinator in Pristina.